An Occasional Reader sent me this explanation of a Chinese character (望) that's relevant in these days of the "Mid Autumn Festival".
It's by a guy who calls himself "Uncle Hanzi", as in "Uncle Chinese character", a westerner, but who knows whereof he speaks when it comes to Chinese characters and their etymology. Which I admire. I admire both him and the characters he studies and explains.
I'd not heard of him before, so thanks to the O.R..
Click the photo above to go to his explanation of the character 望 (wàng) is "to look at" but which I also think of as "to regard", as in looking at while in a relaxed mode, while chillaxing... regarding the moon, looking at with interest, contemplation and some longing.
Like the guy in the photo above, at the end of a pier. Which reminds me so much of the pier in Oslo which we saw in mid-winter some years ago, and I'm going to try to find. To prove my point. While you're waiting, regard the above photo.
LATER: found it. But, tbf, it's not much like the photo I took. Just goes to show the fallibility of memory. Here it is. Or maybe it's like "you've seen one pier you've seen them all". Whereas with the moon, it's different.
ADDED: while we're here, talking about the moon and calligraphy and Chinese poems, I'd like to draw O.R.'s attention to the poem by Li Bai, which I did in my own calligraphy. Which is kind of ok. There's a style there. Not sure it'd be praised by master calligraphers. So I'll just call it guai zi, or "strange characters". Like those of the noted Hong Kong calligrapher, Ding Yanyong. But [ahem] clearly not as good. (or as guai).
"Wang", 望, also became famous after the downfall of the Gang of Four in 1979 and Deng Xiaoping took over. He needed to change the country. He needed to get the thinking away from revenge over the disastrous policies of Mao Tse-tung. He needed some positivity.
He came up with the phrase "望前看" Wang qian kan, or "Look to the future". I was there in China at the time and remember the profound effect this simple phrase had. He had others. He was Trump before Trump. Today we'd call it "reframing".
And, look (望) we get it. "Look to the future" lets lots of horrid people who did horrid things get away with no consequence. But it was needed. As Thomas Sowell says "there's no ideal solution, only trade offs". I guess you could say that Deng was a master of trade offs.
I seem to have wandered rather far from Uncle Hanzi's explanation of the 望 character, of "looking at the moon", so I'll leave it there. For now. I may return.
Back again: I remember also how quickly Chinese made kind of fun of Deng's formulation of "Look to the future". Chinese is full of homonyms. Words that sound alike. So, "qian" as in "the future" also sounds like "money". The phrase quickly became "look to money". Did Deng care about this? I'll bet he did not. It was probably a feature of his little saying, not a bug. He didn't mind, at all, that people said "let's look to making money", when decades had been wasted making Maoism.
